I stepped
off the number 61 bus and walked across Maryhill Road. I had pulled a calf muscle at badminton the
night before and I was in some pain. I
limped towards the office for the last time.
I had been reading the last of the Alan Clark diaries – he said he’d
felt rejected when he had quit the Commons. I was of a similar mind, though not for 380
pages. You don’t always enjoy what you do around the office all the time, but
when it is time for you to quit and wander back into the wilderness, neither
contributing nor earning, it puts matters in quite a different light.
I had one
meeting to attend. Louise gave me a
brief but positive valedictory at the end of it. After that, I was busy writing – I had a
final task to achieve before I went. I got
on with it. They took me to lunch, my
closest colleagues, at the ‘Black Sheep.’
I ate lentil soup and a number of ham and cheese sandwiches. They wouldn’t let me pay for mine.
The conversation was bright but brittle. There were occasional lapses into dead
silence, and then one of the party would try desperately to revive the
discourse. After alI, they hardly knew
me – I had only been hired for a nine-month period and some of them had served
for twenty years.
I sat next to
Alison. Her mother is in hospital, as is
mine. At times, we both wore slightly
worried and anxious expressions. At work, Alison had sat in the desk opposite
me for the whole period and I felt that she was kindly disposed towards me. I trusted her, anyway.
We all strolled back to the office. The sun shone down brightly and a cool breeze
played around our faces. I got Neil to
sign my last pay chit and I faxed it off to my hirers. Alison, Marnie and Louise had bought me a
leather wallet and had a card ready for me.
Marnie had written ‘To the nicest person I have ever met’ and Louise had
written ‘Run Away! Run Away!'. Alison had
merely written her name and drawn a smiling face underneath it. Marnie was leaving early so I said goodbye to
Louise and her first.
Back upstairs, Neil presented me with a Travelling Mini
Zen Gardening Kit. ‘You’re always on
about playing in the sandpit,’ he said, ‘Now here’s real one for you.’ I appreciated the irony. The expression was one I had picked up from
Saltmire some years before, and it referred to a practice environment where one
could test something without wrecking the live system.
I opened the
package. In it was a two-inch square
box, a tiny bag of white sand, another small package containing five minuscule
stones and an inch-long wooden rake. The
idea is to use the rake to draw tiny patterns in the sand, and then place the
five stones appropriately. In that way,
one achieves a state of zen which, according to the blurb, is like drinking
three malt whiskies without the hangover.
I looked at my watch. It was
half-past five. ‘Time I was away,’ I
said, ‘I’ve outlived my usefulness – no-one likes a party-pooper.’ I shook their
hands and hugged Alison. ‘Goodbye,’ I said to her, ‘I won’t see you again. That’s a shame.’ She said nothing, but an enigmatic smile
played about her lips. On my way out, I
said cheerio to Louise. ‘We’d never have
got this far without you,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d been here from the start,’ I said, ‘My task would have been
a whole lot easier.’
I removed my ‘in/out’
label from the status board, walked down two flights of stairs and out through the
staff entrance for the last time. I felt
deflated and alone. I caught a 40A bus back
to the centre and limped wearily along Sauciehall Street. I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard a familiar and lovely sound booming out from the
HMV shop. They had speakers outside and
the strains of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ by the Beatles rent the afternoon
air. I listened intently. It had been
a long and winding road, sure enough, but now I was at the end of it and the next phase was
about to start.
I caught the 18:15
shuttle back to Edinburgh. Near Falkirk
High, my mobile phone bleeped. It was a
text message from Alison. “It must have been a long day for you. Well done for getting through it. Keep in
touch.” I shook my head in sorrow and was immediately lured
into conversation with a demented woman who kept referring to the ‘waifs and
straifs’ who were occupying her daughter’s flat. The next phase had indeed begun.
